Wireless Local Area Networks (W-LANs) have become a widespread technology on the telecommunications market for providing a wide-band connectivity between computers and other electronic devices. W-LANs are currently deployed in various environments, for example industrial companies and public and residential premises, in so far as they enable a high-speed data access for users. The most recent standards, IEEE 802.11a and 802.11 g, are able to provide transmission rates of up to 54 Mb/s, exploiting, as technology for the physical layer (PHY), a technique of Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) and a Bit-Interleaved Coded Modulation (BICM) on 5.2 GHz and 2.4 GHz, respectively. However, the demand for high-rate services for data is continuously growing, and a wider range of coverage is much appreciated in these types of applications. These factors are currently leading to the definition of a new W-LAN standard based upon an innovative technology capable of improving the performance of the entire system.
The adoption of OFDM reduces the complexity of equalization at the expense of a partial loss in bandwidth due to cyclic prefix insertion.
Thanks to pseudo-random bit interleaving, in order to de-correlate successive encoded bits the channel encoder and the QAM modulator (QAM—Quadrature Amplitude Modulation) can be selected independently, thus providing the possibility of different system configurations.
Multiple-Input/Multiple-Output (MIMO) radio interfaces have been studied in depth over the last few years, and have been widely considered as a suitable solution for improving the performance of modern wireless communication systems. The joint use of MIMO and OFDM techniques, in combination with a Space-Frequency Bit-Interleaved-Coded-Modulation (SF-BICM) architecture, as described in D. Zuyderhoff, X. Wautelet, A. Dejonghe, and L. Vandendorpe, “MMSE turbo receiver for space-frequency bit-interleaved coded OFDM”, IEEE Vehicular Technology Conference, 2003, which is incorporated by reference has proven able to provide a high data rate and simultaneously a mitigation of the effects of channel fades.
New-generation W-LAN systems, in addition to guaranteeing an ever-faster data rate, should also guarantee higher levels of performance in terms of system reliability. These factors lead to adopting, at the receiver end, innovative, yet at the same time sophisticated, techniques of decoding and detection, such as, for example, ones based upon the “turbo”-MIMO principle.
To concentrate on the aspect of detection, the optimal technique is based upon the MAP algorithm, which maximizes the a-posteriori probability (MAP—Maximum A-posteriori Probability). The MAP algorithm may, however, not be physically implementable, above all when combined with a high order of modulation, as in the case of 64-QAM.
In fact, by adopting more than one antenna at both the transmitter end and the receiver end, the computational complexity is found to grow exponentially with the order of modulation and also with the number of transmitting antennas.
Consequently, in order to cope with questions of complexity and performance, sub-optimal schemes have been proposed, based upon simpler detectors, such as Minimum-Mean-Square-Error (MMSE) detectors to be used in iterative decoding and detection schemes instead of the MAP algorithm, which, as has been said, maximizes the a-posteriori probability. However, even using MMSE detectors, the computational complexity increases proportionally with the number of iterations, with a consequent major impact also on the latency constraints. Finally, also the constraints on the size of the memory can become a significant aspect especially at the user-terminal end.